We are honored to present the West Coast premiere of VITO, an inspiring tribute to the legendary Vito Russo: author of the groundbreaking The Celluloid Closet, a founding father of the gay liberation movement, and outspoken activist.
As a young man in New York City, Vito was charming, polite, and resourceful. Prominent in the fight for gay rights, he staged an engagement party in 1971 to protest marriage inequality. When infighting threatened the 1973 New York Pride rally, Vito, as the emcee, restored harmony by calling on friend (and ingenue) Bette Midler to perform a song. With the onset of the AIDS epidemic, he became instrumental in forming ACT-UP.
Vito understood that culture is as important as politics in the struggle for equal rights. He hosted gay movie nights in the early ’70s, remarking that seeing films with a gay audience was completely different than doing so with a general audience. This passion for cinema led him to travel the world and screen hundreds of films, finding LGBT characters and stories often hidden from cinematic history. The culmination of this research, The Celluloid Closet, was the most extensive record to date of LGBT representation on screen, and forced an examination of film’s often-homophobic messages.
With heartwarming and humorous interviews of Vito’s family and friends (Armistead Maupin, Jeffrey Freidman, Rob Epstein, and Lily Tomlin among them), and clips from an astonishing collection of film treasures, VITO presents a moving portrait of the person who paved the way for—and proved the importance of—LGBT film festivals like ours.

Film & Gala ticket below includes the Closing Night Gala at the South Lake Union Discovery Center after the film. The other screening below only includes the film. A limited number of film only tickets are available.

West Coast Premiere
Guest in attendance